The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

A critical and constructive analysis of evangelical intellectual culture

Christianity Today, Book of the Year (1995)

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism’s most respected historians.

Unsparing in his judgment, Mark Noll ask why the largest single group of religious Americans – who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence – have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship in North America. In nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have evangelicals failed at sustaining a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture?

Noll is probing and forthright in his analysis of how this situation came about, but he doesn’t end there. Challenging the evangelical community, he sets out to find, within evangelicalism itself, resources for turning the situation around.

Praise for The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Dialog
“Noll’s book provides a bold analysis of the history of evangelical thought in America. Scandal may itself be a history-making book. Named ‘Book of the Year’ by Christianity Today, this volume is a vigorous sign of the renewal of evangelical thinking for which its author calls. This book should be read by persons interested in enlightenment in America, the legacy of fundamentalism, and the relationship of evangelical Christianity to science and politics. This book should be required reading for anyone who still does not know the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical.”

Evangelical Studies Bulletin
“This is a book that every American historian ought to read precisely because it makes one think hard about a subject and a discipline in a way that few books do. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind brilliantly reverses the balance in the principle that the best scholarship is necessarily morally informed, a principle widely, if quietly, shared by the left and right.”

Publishers Weekly
“Required reading for those seeking to understand the often peculiar relationship between Evangelical religion and secular culture, this is a brilliant study by—yes—a first-rate Evangelical mind.”